I have a Toshiba MK6014MAP 6gig hard drive that I am unable to partition, reformate, fdisk I am unable to do anything with it

I have tried fdisk through dos and a windows98 bootdisc, I have tried partition magic, also ultimate boot cd, just about anything you can think of to no avail.

The newest message I get is "failure fixed disk 1"

I am using a Gateway 2000 Solo Laptop which does not allow for the floppy and cd-rom to run at the same time (there is only one slot, so it is one or the other)

I am able to get the laptop to boot using the windows XP 6 discs but this setup cancells once it needs to read the cd-rom, otherwise no other boot disk will work

Also the bios is "Phoenix Bios Note Bios 4.0 setup 1985-96 - Version 7.44". As my knowledge in bios is very limited I am unsure if this is all correct as it seems to me that there is a couple of different things conflicting ontop of the hard drive problem

Please help

Lisa

OK what are you try to achieve here.
I'm bemused that you are try to partition a 6Gb drive, seems a bit of a waste of time.
What OS are you looking to install, as part of the XP install is partition and format ?
Also you start by mentioning a Toshiba machine than go on to talk about a Gateway one. Which is it?

Sorry if little confusing but daylight now here and I still no closer

It is a Gateway laptop with a toshiba hard drive and all I am trying to do is re-install any operating system so that my young daughter may use it

I was not trying to partition a 6 gig hard drive... that would make no sense, all I want to do is format the hard drive which it will not do until it has a dos partition which I cannot get any fdisk program to do

Does it see the hard drive? Maybe set to slave and not master.

When I boot up with a win98 boot disk in the floppy I get 2 msg's - 1st, failure fixed disk 1, press F1 to resume , F2 to setup... I press resume (F1) and it all seems to go fine until windows is due to start, then I get 2nd message saying that there is no partition on the hard drive and to use fdisk at the a: prompt... upon doing that I get a final message saying error reading disk

If I use the 6 windows xp floppies I am able to boot all the way up until it needs to read the cd-rom... which it is unable to find due to the problem that this laptop does not allow for both floppy and cd-rom to plugged in at the same time

To add to my woes, the cd-rom only works part of the time... well actually only once and I cannot remember what settings I changed to get it to work... yes I tell it to boot from the cd-rom but it just won't do it... someone said it mite be a memory problem?

Sounds to me like the drive is dead.

Finally, I can lay it to rest... thank you... I really wanted to make sure as a new one will cost a little more than I have, but I have tried everything and read just about everything so I am feeling better about taking the hard drive on a long drive to the country hehehe

But I will connect it to my PC first just to make sure

Thank you for your help and time

Lol -- you could have connected to your desktop for reformat --install operating system also -- Savage

Look for the "load default values" key from the bios setup and proceed to do that. Then try to reboot. If that fails then I think the hard drive is truly damaged and cannot be used.
Also try installing linux on it and if u get the same situation then you have to conclude that the disk cannot be used.